FBI, Scotland Yard help probe into Dhaka mutiny

Dhaka, March 19 (IANS) A second team of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from US is here even as a British Scotland Yard team is working to help Bangladesh investigate last month’s mutiny by troopers of the border guards. The FBI’s second team, comprising eight members, joined the probe after Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s government sought assistance earlier this month to probe “local and foreign links” to the Feb 25-26 massacre at the Bangladesh Rifles (BDR) headquarters in the capital.

“The second FBI team has arrived. We have sought their help to find out the local and international connections to the BDR carnage,” Commerce Minister Faruk Khan, who is coordinating the mutiny probes, said Wednesday.

Brig. Gen. Md Mainul Islam, director general of the BDR, whose predecessor, Major General Shakil Ahmed was gunned down during the mutiny, told The Daily Star: “The FBI team visited all the crime scenes at Pilkhana. Members of the probe body formed by the home ministry and investigators from the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) accompanied them… I also talked to them.”

Khan claimed that the probes into the mutiny were “going on properly”, and the reports would be made public shortly.

“We are not hiding anything. We have been transparent from the beginning. We will disclose everything by making the investigation reports public,” he said.

Asked why foreign connection is being suspected, the minister said: “So many army officers cannot be killed only for a few kilograms of rice.”

The army-BDR disparity in salaries and rations was one of the reasons behind the mutiny that led to the killing of over 70 people, most of whom were Bangladesh Army officers on deputation to the BDR.